Amores Perros
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Movie Reviews of Amores Perros
Movie Review: A Stunning Film Experience
Summary: 5 Stars
From Mexico, from some huge urban environment, a film has emerged that stuns, angers, seduces, and challenges us. Director Alejandro Gonzaliz Inarritu has created a dark vision of the trinity; three overlapping plots and three sets of overlapping characters, impaled at their core by a horrible car crash; a crash that touches and changes all of them. It has a stark veneer of sadness, but it is beautifully photographed in bursts of Latin colors; scenes of carnival juxtaposed with scenes of seduction, murder, violence, and lethal lonliness. This unique vision vibrates, reasonates, throbs, and is inhabited by dogs; from vicious killers to lap pooches. These canine players emerge as the conscience, and the soft underbelly of the film. All of the film's main characters own a dog, or many dogs. The people behave like pack animals; they identify with and behave like their dogs. Often they love their dogs more than they do their fellow man; and what they covet, what they love the most...they destroy. The scenes of professional dog-fighting were, of course, shocking beyond measure. Somehow one knows the deaths and bloodshed were F/X, but each time it happened we had to recheck our reality meter.
During the overlap of lives and plots, there are restarts of the scenario from fresh perspectives. This movie hits hard, and we are left limp from the experience. We emerge back into our lives, ready to reassess what we can settle for; in terms of our personal happiness.
Movie Review: An epic, if there ever was one
Summary: 5 Stars
In spite of some minor quality issues with the DVD, I was awe-struck by this movie. I thought of Babel, which has a similar structure (it's more global) of three stories connected by one accident.
"Amores Perros" is definitely absorbing and I think I will need to view it at least one more time. I didn't get one of the angles - in the third story, of the dog Cofi teaching a valuable lesson to El Chivo the vagrant - until I saw one of the special features. I'm sure this is just one of the many rich insights a repeated viewing would generate.
I found it especially interesting that the stories are set in different layers of society - there is a supermodel, there are people leading a borderline existence and there is a complete outcast.
I do disagree with some of the reviewers who have said that the film is all about Mexican culture. It has integrity because it is genuine, but the insights are very universal.
I did note one uncharacteristic glitch - one of the characters says that he doesn't wear glasses as he's OK with seeing blurred, but later in the movie he's seeing well at quite a distance.
I don't want to use the stock words to try to describe the many things this movies achieves. As some reviewers have pointed out, if you can steel yourself to watch some gory scenes of dogfighting (which have been filmed without harming animals), you will probably find that this is a great movie.
Movie Review: Fang-sharp film
Summary: 5 Stars
Ok. First of all. It's not "Life's a bitch", nor, "Loving dogs" it actually means something very close to "Bitch love affairs". Well, now my review. This is one of the first modern mexican movies I have seen in years and it truly was a surprising departure from the downright uninspired, commercial and simply vulgar movies the mexican film-industry was apparently caught in during most of the '80s. This movie is excellent, although you have got to see it with a very open-mind. It displays much more gore and violence than the average person is ordinarily accustomed to watch at films but it certainly is a unique vision from its director at the ruthlessness and paper-thin barrier that separates what we deem so perfect, neat and stable, civilized from complete chaos of passionate and reckless love, envy, death, life's fragilty and, in two words, true human nature, with all its beauty and uglyness intermixed below the surfaceof things. This movies deals with modern human life is also compared to man's best friend, our relationship with them and the very similarities of our feelings, being difficult to distinguish from that of a so called inferior species when we, with our precious mind, civilization and urbanity tend almost always to think better of ourselves. Great film, excellent portrait of life at its very, white-bone, bare nature.Movie Review: Underneath It All, It's An Intimate Film About Families
Summary: 5 Stars
The reason why this film works so beautifully is that beneath the plot veneer of violence and schemes is a common theme of family and strained relationships that connects all the characters. A man falls in love with his brother's wife and plans to run away with her. A contract killer comes to terms with his past in which he left his wife and daughter for a revolutionary cause. A brother wants to kill his half-brother for money. A man leaves his devoted wife to pursue his love for a model... All these characters and situations are drawn beautifully, without easy caricaturization: all the people and situations in this movie are complex. "Amores Perros", aside from its dizzying, frenetic plot and action, is one of the more contemplative films about strains of human and familial relationships, and the loneliness that comes from them. The dialogue is tough, but lyrical, and some of the metaphors are very effective. For example, the female model's dog jumps into a hole in the floor and doesn't surface back up. This not only creates a strange tension, but also reflects the psychological unease that accompanies the relationship between the man and the woman. "Amores Perros" is a happy confluence of filmmaker's passion and careful craftsmanship. International cinema is fast catching up, and threatening to surpass American cinema.
Movie Review: Brutal and brilliant
Summary: 5 Stars
Amores Perros, which could only be loosely translated as "Love is a Bitch" is a fabulous movie--and is meant to be experienced--as Inarritu, its director has said as one long scream. And it is just that, but with enough tonal variations to render it a cinematic opera. The threads or maybe bloodlines of a number of disparate lives interweave in this thickly textured look at Third World post-modernism, which although may sound like a phoney label, is apt, because the movie eschews the stereotypes of Mexican life and zeroes in on characters caught in a whirlpool of need, poverty, egocentrism, and anarchy. This is a political film that is never polemical. The plots, actions, characters carry you away like a combination roller coaster/haunted house--which both keeps you on the edge of your seat because of its intensity and violence, while mesmerizing you with the seriousness with which the characters struggle with themselves,their society, and a growing anomie. Happily Inarritu eschews rehashing mock-documentary social realism whose tedium can be seen in another recent Latin American film "City of God," and comes up with an original work of art. See the DVD to get an inside look on how the dog fights were staged (especially appropriate for animal lovers who might be turned off by the scenes of dogfighting for profit).